by Una Mullally*

[Disclaimer: I’m not a tech head, so there are probably hundreds of techy blogs out there in the Irish blogosphere that I don’t read and may well be marvellous. What I’m talking about here is the bulk of the Irish blogosphere, a mess of personal and pop culture musings, which appears to be falling apart, or at least waning in influence given the retiring of ‘names’ from the ‘sphere, and also due to the continuing and frantic adaptation of Twitter as a prime social media tool. For the record, I used to have a blog called UnaRocks, and I currently have one publicising the club night I run called SoundCheck. Outside of that, I’m a journalist with the Sunday Tribune and a presenter with TG4.]

There’s a point in ‘Monsters Inc’ where Randall (the evil chameleon-type monster) says, “shh, shh, shh, do you hear that?” before cupping his hand to his ear to listen to nothing, and adding “it’s the winds of change.” Perhaps nothing spells change more than a similar silence, or things just… stopping. This week, Rick O’Shea, much loved blogger and 2fm DJ, stopped blogging. Rick holds unique stature in the blogging community. He likeable, prolific, award winning, and hosts the blog awards, but also, many saw him as some sort of blogging agent in RTE. A guy firmly steeped in new media who holds a strong position in the oldest old media in Oldtown, the State broadcaster. And now, like other bloggers of late, he quit.

The Sunday Times recently tried to articulate in an inevitably ham-fisted fashion that blogging in Ireland was somehow over just because it doesn’t seem to be as buzzy as late. Are they right? Not entirely, but the winds of change are picking up. Or should I say *winds of change pick up*.

So, why now? Well, Twitter (duh) has a huge amount to do with it. Blogging isn’t over, but Twitter has obviously taken the place of short form thoughts, linking, news, titbits, whereas blogging will increasingly be about longer form pieces. Unless a blog is absolutely useful, busy and original in its collection of content and thought (like Agenda Inc for example), then why would you blog instead of tweet? And check this out, some people actually have better things to do then blog. When I quit blogging, a giant chunk of my time was freed up. I didn’t notice how much time I was spending blogging before quitting, because blogging was a part of the very fabric of my day. Twitter doesn’t seem to take up much time. Just a couple of seconds per tweet. I went back to blogging recently, started posting and realised I didn’t have the time for it, and my automatic reaction when it came to sharing something with the rest of the interweb; a link, a video, an opinion, was to hit TweetDeck, not Wordpress. So I quit. Again.

Along with bloggers heading to Twitter, blog readers as an audience are also migrating there too. For this, Irish bloggers probably only have themselves to blame. Despite the attempt at group blogs, apart from Blogorrah, we’ve never had that big hit for blogs in Ireland. There’s no Gawker, no Perez, no Huffington. Apart from a few exceptions (most of them quite niche, like Beaut.ie) we never came up with a mainstream platform that everyone would love reading and keep reading. The bloggers who have quit seem to have been going for a while, and have reached the end of their blogging cycle and are moving on to other things, or perhaps just concentrating more on the things that they already do.

But mostly, I think blogging is falling a little flat right now in Ireland because it was never very inflated in the first place. The problem with Irish blogs (as is with a lot of stuff, Irish or not) is that most of them aren’t any good. Most are poorly researched, badly written, lacking in authority and unoriginal if they’re about ‘something’, or boring, annoying or pointless if they’re about ‘someone’. I have to admit, I read very few Irish blogs, even when I was blogging. So I read Nialler9, because it’s a music blog that stands up internationally. I read Dublin Streets because I like looking at street style photos in my neighbourhood. I read Maman Poulet because it’s probably the best Irish blog in terms of generating content that’s actually newsworthy. I read Twenty Major because I find the ‘voice’ funny and well written. I (used to) read Rick O’Shea’s blog because I like his point of view and his photographs. I read On The Record because it’s a must for any one who has anything to do with music in Ireland, and because Jim’s a great writer and not afraid of pissing people off, which is refreshing. I read Mulley’s blog just out of habit I suppose, although I find his penchant for responding to a tickle with a punch rather disconcerting. I read Panti’s several times a day because it’s by far the best pop culture blog in the country and beyond and turns up countless gems for me on a daily basis, as well as occasional news/rants/info on relevant gay stuff. I read Gaelick too. I read others authored by friends; Lili Forberg, Davih Speaks, Tainer Bang, etc, but that’s about it. Maybe that seems like a large reading list, but it’s dwarfed by what I read internationally. Should one compare Irish content with non-Irish (namely American) content? Is it fair to compare like with kinda like just because Ireland has a much smaller population? Maybe not. Or maybe so, considering the internet is a borderless entity.

The veracity with which bloggers fight back when Luddites in ‘old’ media accuses them all of being ill-informed moaners is stoked by the inner knowledge that a lot of blogging is muck, especially in Ireland. That’s not to say that a lot of ‘old’ journalism isn’t muck as well, but that’s besides the point. The unrelenting hypocrisy of bloggers going apeshit when a newspaper, radio station or any other offline media source nicks a story or theme is beyond ridiculous considering that the bulk of non-personal blog content is culled from those very media sources. Then again, the old media V new media argument is as pointless as the public sector V private sector one. And there’s a bang of wood from the trees from it. In the same way that public and private sectors should be joining forces to fight the bigger pain of the government itself rather than each other, old and new should be vying to provide higher quality content, not slamming each other for falling short. This constantly flickering inferiority/superiority complex doesn’t do anyone any good, and serves merely to dig up insecurities within both old and new media.

No matter how much it is contested, the blogosphere is horrendously backslapping. It’s like a really insular music scene where everyone feeds from the same influences, collaborates with the same people, goes to each others shows, and then congratulates each other on how brilliant they all are. But everyone is missing the point. Because it doesn’t matter what people who are doing the same thing think about what you’re doing, what matters is who outside your clique you’re reaching. As a result of this insularity, quality falls, but the artificial gauze of quality lies over even the most incredibly mediocre content due to the blogger’s and commenter’s (often bloggers themselves) tenacity for praising each other. If I had a euro for every shite post being heralded as great by someone, I would be a rich, rich lady. At least rival journalists hate each other, and slag each other off, which although unpleasant, fosters competition. While it’s all very lovely to have a nice community where everyone can chat and compare notes, lack of competition fosters laziness, and laziness fosters below par output.

Bloggers often pretend to be a proud stand alone source, but that’s not entirely true either. Many seem to use blogging as their first stepping stone for getting on in other forms of media. Because of this, blogging will always be seen as rung number one on the media ladder, unless you work for the Irish Times or something and you’re dragged by the scruff of your neck into blogville. I think it’s only unfair in exceptions to describe blogging as anything else. The Irish blogsphere is populated by wannabes using a blog to broadcast themselves in the hope of latching on to other gigs, branding themselves as if their opinions or writing or indeed their ‘selves’ as a product is worth branding, and publicising various projects/work/whatever they’re undertaking outside of their blog. Why would anyone want to read that?

I think that ‘first wave’ of Irish blogging was over a long time ago, probably around the time Blogorrah hit the dirt, but in spite of time and an increase of participants and bigger audience there seems to be no real drive to improve content. People will always read something good – online or offline – and until that something good (hopefully in plural) starts to emerge and while good bloggers log off indefinitely, Irish blogging, for what it’s worth, is in a state of disarray.

Una on Twitter

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*Not me.

Techwire asks ‘Are Irish blogs just crap?’.

The answer is no, but the Irish blogging scene is crap. To me it all just feels a little dead at the moment.

There’s not enough conflict. And by that I don’t mean fighting, although those are always good, but there seems to be a unformity of opinion on matters social, political, moral and everything else.

How can you stimulate debate and argument when everybody’s too fucking busy telling everyone else how great they are?

It’s as boring as fuck and while I fully understand the community aspects of it, or at least people’s desires to make a community out of it, there’s no rule which says you can’t disagree with somebody about something. I’m sure everyone has friends whose views differ from theirs. It might be something as simple as supporting a rival football team or something religious or social, such as anti-abortion or pro-choice. You can argue with them, can’t you? It doesn’t mean you hate them.

There are those that try and debate but I’ve seen them dismissed or banned from leaving more comments on certain blogs, simply because they’ve challenged what has been written. Yet censorship of that kind elsewhere would be derided with gusto, and rightly so.

So why won’t people argue on Irish blogs anymore? There was a time when you could find a good scrap every day of the week, now people are meeting up and having pints and posting photos of themselves having pints.

Which is all well and good and lovely in real life but it’s crap for blogging.